Executive summary
Frontwalker partnered with a leading foodservice distribution company to provide dedicated staff augmentation for the Cloud Pricing Platform. This mission-critical system powers ingredient ordering and dynamic pricing across thousands of restaurant customers throughout the United States.
By embedding experienced engineers directly into the agile development squads, Frontwalker accelerated feature delivery and strengthened platform reliability. The engagement enabled the client to scale engineering capacity on demand while maintaining the precision required for complex, multi-state tax jurisdictions and differentiated fee structures across diverse customer segments.
The challenge
1. Business challenge
- State-by-state tax complexity requiring the platform to accurately reflect varying tax rates, surcharges, and regulatory fees across all US states where the client operates
- Customer-type pricing differentiation - the platform needed to apply distinct fee structures for walk-in restaurants (higher service fees), drive-through operators, and cloud/virtual kitchens (reduced fee tiers)
- Scaling engineering capacity to match the rapid pace of product development and new feature rollouts across a large, distributed customer base
- Maintaining platform uptime and pricing accuracy for time-sensitive ordering workflows, where pricing errors directly impact customer trust and operational margins
- Coordinating between distributed product teams while preserving delivery velocity and code quality standards
2. Technical challenge
- Building a dynamic pricing engine capable of real-time multi-jurisdiction tax calculation with consistently low latency across thousands of concurrent orders
- Designing flexible customer classification models to support variable fee logic - differentiating service fees, delivery charges, and surcharges by customer type at the transaction level
- Ensuring data integrity and synchronisation between the pricing engine, ordering module, and customer-facing interfaces
- Supporting a continuously evolving product roadmap while managing technical debt within an enterprise-scale codebase
- Integrating seamlessly into the client’s established engineering workflows, tooling, and sprint cadences with minimal onboarding overhead
What we did
1) Delivered Solution
Frontwalker provided a dedicated, embedded engineering team that contributed directly to the development, enhancement, and maintenance of the Cloud Pricing Platform. Key deliverables included:
- Dynamic pricing and tax engine enhancements - developed and maintained state-specific tax calculation logic with real-time accuracy across all active US jurisdictions
- Customer-tier fee architecture - designed and implemented differentiated fee computation models for walk-in restaurants, drive-through operators, and cloud/virtual kitchen customers
- Ingredient ordering integration - supported the ordering pipeline to ensure pricing data propagated accurately to customer-facing ordering interfaces
- Platform reliability improvements - identified and resolved performance bottlenecks, reducing pricing discrepancy incidents reported by end customers
- API layer contributions - extended and optimised REST API endpoints supporting pricing queries from restaurant customers and internal systems
2) Engineering & delivery
- Embedded Frontwalker engineers into existing agile squads, participating in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, code reviews, and retrospectives
- Contributed to application architecture decisions for pricing and ordering modules, improving maintainability and extensibility of the codebase
- Delivered modular, well-tested code with strong coverage across pricing logic layers to support safe, continuous deployment
- Supported CI/CD pipeline operations, enabling frequent, low-risk releases of platform updates
- Maintained thorough documentation of pricing rules, fee configurations, and tax logic to support ongoing team knowledge transfer
3) Collaboration model
- Offshore engineering capability fully integrated into the client’s sprint cycles, roadmap planning, and product decision workflows
- Regular synchronisation with the client’s engineering leads and product stakeholders for alignment on priorities and delivery expectations
- Frontwalker brought global delivery expertise, combined with a strong understanding of enterprise product development standards
- Established a scalable, always-on support model enabling the client to flex engineering capacity in line with platform demands
Business impact/results
Outcomes achieved
- Faster Delivery: Accelerated sprint velocity through dedicated offshore engineers
- Multi-State Tax Accuracy: Real-time pricing across all active US jurisdictions
- Customer-Tier Pricing: Differentiated fee structures for walk-in, drive-through & cloud restaurants
- Always-On Engineering: Scalable long-term support model aligned to the client’s roadmap
- Increased feature delivery throughput for the Cloud Pricing Platform through reliable, embedded engineering augmentation
- Improved accuracy of state-specific tax and fee calculations across all customer segments, reducing pricing errors in production
- Enabled scalable, configurable pricing differentiation for walk-in restaurants, drive-through operators, and cloud/virtual kitchens
- Reduced engineering bottlenecks within the client's organisation by providing a responsive, always-available offshore team.
- Enhanced platform stability and system reliability, supporting the client’s commitment to operational excellence for its foodservice customers
- Supported continued platform growth as th expanded into new markets and onboarded new restaurant customer segments
- Strengthened internal knowledge transfer through thorough documentation of pricing logic, tax rules, and fee configurations
